🕶️ City Detect raises $13M so AI can patrol your streets

City Detect, a startup that uses vision AI to help local governments monitor buildings and neighborhoods, has raised $13 million in a Series A round led by Prudence Venture Capital. Founded in 2021 and led by CEO Gavin Baum-Blake, the company aims to tackle urban blight by mounting cameras on municipal vehicles like garbage trucks and street sweepers. These cameras capture images of buildings and streets, which City Detect’s computer vision system analyzes to detect issues such as graffiti, illegal dumping, litter, roof damage, and other signs of property neglect.

The platform automates a process that is typically manual, allowing cities to review thousands of properties per week instead of about 50, improving how quickly issues are identified and addressed. City Detect includes privacy protections like blurring faces and license plates and can even distinguish between street art and vandalism. Currently operating in 17 cities including Dallas and Miami, the company will use the new funding to hire more engineers, improve its storm-damage detection capabilities, and expand across the United States.

In 2021, there were nearly 35,000 rounds of funding globally, with 20,000 of them being Angel or Seed rounds.

Despite a dip in angel investments during the pandemic, venture capital funding surged — not just in number, but in size. In fact, over $600 billion was raised in 2021, doubling the amount raised the previous year.

However, securing funding is still a rare achievement. In the US alone, more than 5 million new businesses were registered in 2021, but fewer than 4,500 early-stage companies managed to raise venture capital. That's just 0.08%.

This highlights how many companies aren't seen as "venture-backable" — which is one reason we pivoted our product to cater to all startups, not just those backed by venture capital.

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Claude, Anthropic’s AI chatbot, is seeing a surge in consumer growth following the company’s dispute with the Pentagon. After CEO Dario Amodei refused to allow the U.S. government to use Anthropic’s AI for mass surveillance or fully autonomous weapons, the company was labeled a supply-chain risk. However, the stance appears to have boosted public support. Data from Appfigures shows Claude’s mobile app downloads in the U.S. recently surpassed ChatGPT’s, reaching about 149,000 daily downloads compared with 124,000 for ChatGPT.

Usage is also rapidly increasing. According to Similarweb, Claude reached 11.3 million daily active users on mobile by March 2, up 183% since the start of 2026, though it still trails far behind ChatGPT’s 250.5 million daily active users. Claude has also seen strong web traffic growth and more than 1 million new signups per day, recently becoming the No. 1 app on the U.S. App Store and topping charts in 15 other countries. Anthropic says daily active users have more than tripled this year, while paid subscriptions have doubled.